The disproportionate impact of emergencies on people with disabilities

In all wars and disasters, it is persons with disabilities that are first to die; persons with disabilities that are the first to get disease and infection; and it is persons with disabilities who are the last to get resources and medicines when they are handed out. They get treated at the bottom of the pile” (Stubbs in WRC 2008: 6).

Why is this the case? Lack of awareness, negative attitudes and physical barriers

Discriminatory attitudes, poverty and structural inequalities, the loss of assistive devices and support networks, and lack of accessible information or emergency evacuation procedures result in people with disabilities being left behind, losing their independence, being vulnerable to abuse, and at disproportionate risk of death or injury.

Lack of awareness of their needs, discriminatory attitudes, and physical inaccessibility mean people with disabilities often face challenges in having their basic needs and rights to food, shelter, health, and security met in emergency relief efforts.

One size does not fit all – people with disabilities have diverse needs

Having conducted research on one of the most invisible groups of people in humanitarian emergencies, people with intellectual disabilities, I really appreciate the briefing’s recognition of the diversity of disability. That, for example, a person using a wheelchair or on crutches may be visible in a crowd, but someone with hearing or learning difficulties may go unnoticed. Or that women with disabilities may be treated differently than men with disabilities. Often it seems that if people with disabilities’ needs are considered, it has been to meet short-term needs in relation to physical impairments acquired as a result of the emergency. While providing prosthetics is vitally important, so is creating an inclusive and accessible environment which overcomes all the other barriers which disable people and prevent people with different disabilities accessing education or livelihoods or even emergency food and non-food items.

How can we make emergency relief efforts more inclusive?

Thankfully awareness is increasing and some progress is being made. Article 11 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities relates to situations of risk and emergencies. The newest edition of the Sphere Standards has disability as a cross cutting issue. Donors are introducing disability inclusive policies and NGOs have created manuals on inclusive humanitarian action. However, as the rapid response briefing makes clear, much more needs to be done, especially when it comes to implementation. As it recommends:

People with disabilities should be involved across the humanitarian cycle, including in long-term reconstruction.

It is important to follow a twin-track approach, having both accessible mainstream responses as well as dedicated responses for specific needs.

There should be training to develop awareness, skills and competencies on disability inclusion for humanitarian practitioners, policymakers and donors.

There needs to be an agreed set of meaningful indicators for identifying needs and capacities of people with different types of disabilities to ensure they are included.

Following these recommendations would help enable more inclusive emergency relief efforts – ones that fully recognise the rights and needs of all people with disabilities.

Brigitte Rohwerder is a Research Officer at IDS working on governance, social development, humanitarian response and conflict issues, and providing support to DFID, DFAT and EC advisors.

The world is paying plenty of attention these days to Ebola infections and deaths. It is paying much less attention to helping Ebola survivors recover and reintegrate. This is a mistake, not just because survivors need help (they do), but because helping survivors is one of the most important tools for preventing the further spread of the disease. As West African Ebola survivors return from medical facilities into society, they report to their friends and families on what they have experienced there, on the quality of treatment and terminal care for the dying. Their testimonies affect the willingness of others to seek care in these facilities. If people in the broader community hear stories of inadequate treatment and neglect from survivors, or if survivors are ostracised on their return, then the community will resist public-health efforts, hide infected family members and refuse to cooperate with medical institutions. This helps the virus spread.

In other words, decent treatment of Ebola victims when they are in medical facilities, and helping survivors to reintegrate and regain their livelihoods afterwards, are critical to slowing the epidemic. But in the traumatised, fearful communities struck by the disease, Ebola survivors are often stigmatised and destitute when they return. Many are plagued by survivors’ guilt and depression. Their social support networks may be damaged by the deaths of caregivers, relatives and friends. Neighbours, or even their own children, are scared of them. Their houses, utensils and even their food reserves have sometimes been burned in efforts to destroy the virus. The interrelated effects of stigma, fear and poverty are highlighted in Alain Epelboin’s film “Ebola is Not a Laughing Matter”, about his experiences working with Red Cross workers from Congo.

How can organisations help Ebola survivors reintegrate?

A number of ideas are being mooted. One international organisation has tabled the idea of giving survivors jobs burying the dead. Given the stigma they already suffer from, this idea clearly has some risks. Another idea is to get survivors to play the crucial role of donating their convalescent blood and plasma products, which may have antibodies that can help others survive. But in areas long rife with rumours of organ trading, this raises issues as well.

Anthropologists, with their expertise in how cultures, institutions and physical phenomena interact, can help answer these types of questions. But surprisingly few anthropologists have worked recently in the West African countries most affected by Ebola. Some of the most detailed ethnographic literature on daily life in these countries dates back to the colonial era; more recently, participatory observations and fieldwork have been hindered by decades of instability and conflict. But health professionals need anthropologists’ expertise on highly specific aspects of daily life, such as burial practices and managing bodily fluids, in order to provide clear and practical advice on the outbreak and build locally appropriate interventions.

The concept of giving survivors a livelihood by employing them for burial ceremonies was recently raised at the UK-based Ebola Response Anthropology Platform (ERAP). Survivors’ immune systems are more likely to be resistant to contracting Ebola from otherwise highly contagious corpses, improving prevention. Besides income, the job would give survivors an important new role in their old communities. This idea is apparently particularly popular among some of the religious organisations working on the ground in West Africa. Employing stigmatised survivors to bury Ebola casualties sounds like a great idea. But as any anthropologist student can tell you, ideas that make perfect sense from one perspective can make less sense from a different one.

Exploring ideas from all perspectives

When I invited members of ERAP to contribute their views, it became clear that this potentially innovative idea still needed quite a bit more thought. Medical burial teams have already antagonised many communities through culturally unacceptable burial methods: cremation, improper handling of the dead, concealing the dead person’s face, and so on. James Fairhead, of the University of Sussex, pointed out that given these tensions, the proposal would be “giving an already ostracised group (i.e. Ebola survivors) the role of burying others in what is often a highly disapproved-of way. The question arises: is this likely to (a) add to the stigma of that group, and (b) add to the negative image of the ETCs (Emergency Treatment Centres)… One needs to avoid as much as possible negative attitudes to ETCs (or the more decentralised units) as it is going to become so important that people come to them voluntarily to seek health.” Organisations can engage with communities to overcome these contradictions, but that may or may not work. Community engagement on the employment of survivors in burial ceremonies has to take these perceptions into account, and not be dismissed as “stigma”.

Paul Richards and many other anthropologists have pointed out that “community myths” or “misperceptions” are often grounded in reality, or in incomplete information. That semen is still infective up to 90 days after recovery makes Ebola also a sexually transmitted disease. Campaigns have not focused on the sexuality of Ebola survivors or on breastfeeding mothers. Breast milk also has to be avoided up to 90 days after recovery. The Ebola Survivor who was said to have ‘Infected his Wife to Death’ is likely to have done this through sexual contact. People unaware of these transmission vectors who then witness wives or children of survivors contract Ebola and die may come to fear all interactions with survivors. Avoiding people who have contracted a disease can be perfectly rational behaviour if you lack accurate information on how the disease is communicated. It is important to avoid exoticising or pathologising such behaviour, and to instead obtain a factual comprehension of the behaviours or situations that result in survivors being stigmatised. In some cases, social avoidance of survivors may have nothing to do with Ebola, but with the fact that survivors are destitute, needy and miserable, and people want to avoid feeling guilty. This is quite similar to the widespread social rejection experienced until recently by child soldiers or cancer and HIV patients.

Employing survivors to bury the dead with dignity has powerful emotive and spiritual resonances; it is easy to see why the idea appeals to religious organisations. But as Fairhead points out, one can “appreciate religious institutions as compassionate towards the ostracised,” while also recognising that some of the practices they find appealing may be divisive. Before deploying suggestions for reintegrating Ebola survivors in West Africa, it is important to have a sense of how these initiatives will actually be received in the local cultural context, in the midst of a raging epidemic. And getting the recovery and reintegration of survivors right, and making them allies in prevention efforts, is crucial to the effort to stop the spread of the disease.

The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is a joint effort of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Institute of Development Studies, the University of Exeter and the University of Sussex

The Valuing Volunteering project that IDS is undertaking with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) is exploring the role of volunteers as development workers. I often hear volunteers tell me that one of the conditions of their success is the “willingness of the community”. In a World Café discussion with Filipino and British volunteers we discussed the example of International Citizen Service (ICS) volunteers doing research using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in Ghana. The aspect of their placement that volunteers found most difficult was not learning the PRA process, which took weeks and weeks, but the realisation that the community didn’t want a stake in the participatory process. One of the participants recalled a local volunteer who screamed in frustration, “why don’t they want our help?” In a similar epiphany in the Philippines, volunteers realised, somewhat painfully, that some schools didn’t want to accept their offers to run Information Education and Communication campaigns with students.

Misplaced assumptions

As development workers offering their resources for free, volunteers and programmes supporting volunteers presume that a community is going to be as receptive as they are eager to help. As researchers or practitioners we can fall into the same trap: we risk assuming the burning research question or difficult-to-fund project consuming our working days will strike an instant chord with the people we hope will benefit from it. This reciprocation is often an unspoken assumption in our theories of change about how we contribute to alleviating poverty. So we just jump right on in there, brimming with energy and primed for a successful outcome only to find progress elusive and frustrating.

A different approach

The volunteers discovered that it is not realistic to expect a community to be interested, even in their most valiant efforts. So what does this reality tell us about the way we should begin our relationship with a community or group of people we really want to work with?

1. Commit a little time up front to work out what makes a community “willing” or not

It turns out all sorts of things affect whether people are receptive or keen to harness our energy. The Valuing Volunteering research found the following factors important, either working in isolation or in combination:

Lack of understanding and trust in what a volunteer is about

Previous negative experiences with volunteers / development workers

Seeing that the change process is complex and difficult, so easier not to engage

What outsiders see as needs do not correspond with what local people see as important

Timing – other priorities and commitments prevent people from engaging

Participation comes at personal, social or economic costs hidden to the outsider

2. Reframe expectations about participation

For many valid reasons, people may not want the kind of assistance we think it is important to give right now. And this is ok. We should be content with small, more mutual beginnings, which build trust. The ICS volunteers in the Philippines decided to work first with the schools who wanted more information on solid waste management. They will create something good and see if this piques interest elsewhere.

If we find levels of participation rapidly sink from high to low as we get into the messy, complex process of making change happen, we shouldn’t despair but celebrate! Fewer participants usually equal more participation. And it means we are beginning to identify the local people who will sustain our efforts. The first follower is often an under-appreciated form of leadership. We should encourage and not dismiss their importance because the total number of participants does not meet pre-determined beliefs about what good attendance looks like.

3. Create the spaces and relationships to find the people who do have energy

Communities are not homogeneous entities. This creates multiple opportunities for volunteers and development workers to harness local interest. We just need to know how to listen and where to look. On another island in the Philippines, we used systems mapping to create a big picture of issues and local dynamics. We found an important local driver for change was not protection of marine ecosystems per se, but the family breakdown that resulted from low fish catch. Our entry points were different but we found common ground. And this was enough to get going.

The list is clearly not exhaustive. But the ideas raised have something in common. In these examples development workers have tried to think systemically about why momentum for change is slow before coming up with precise interventions. This process resulted in a re-assessment of their role in the change process as being co-dependent on the interest and energy of the community to embark on a journey with them. We found the fight against poverty doesn’t need more willingness on the part of communities to fall in line with our way of thinking at all. It requires different approaches – and the confidence and conviction that come with them – to enable development workers to work in more reflexive and iterative ways.

Jody Aked works as researcher for the IDS-VSO partnership ‘Valuing Volunteering’ in the Phillipines. She is also a PhD student with the PPSC Team.

Having let out my own whoop of delight on reading my email this morning I knew I was not alone – our corridors are a-buzz with the excellent news that Professor John Gaventa has been appointed as Director of Research here at IDS. John is currently Director of the Coady International Institute and Vice President of International Development at StFX University in Canada. He was formerly Chair of Oxfam GB, for which he received an OBE, and is renowned as a leading researcher, educator and practitioner on issues of citizenship and citizen engagement, power and participation, and governance and accountability around the world.

For many years John was at IDS heading up our Participation Team and associated research consortia, which is how I came to know him. He was an inspirational colleague and leader, combining clear-thinking, innovative and wise research with a genuinely participatory and pioneering approach, all of which are deeply rooted in a life of activism and a compelling conviction that it is possible to change the world for the better.

One of the first times I met John, some 17 years ago, was attending a film screening one lunchtime about a community he was involved with in the US. It documented how a group of citizens, mostly poor but living in a resource-rich valley, came together to fight for their rights which were being eroded by a large, powerful and intimidating mining company. In the conversation afterwards John told some hair-raising tales of the activities he and the community undertook together to achieve this. I found the film very inspiring but was also struck by the importance of research and leadership that stems from the personal: from being part of real-life, grounded and sometimes challenging experiences, and from being able to reflect and learn from them.

John’s enthusiasm, thinking and vision has continued to influence and encourage me (and many, many others around the world) over the intervening years. I am so glad he is returning to take up this role at IDS. And I know that someone who, on a rare weekend off, can determinedly walk 100km in under 30 hours to raise money for Oxfam will have the energy to steer IDS research into a bright and exciting future. We all look forward to your return John – see you in January!

As we move into a period of post-2015 ‘stock-taking’ in advance of the UNGA at the end of September, Participate partners have been critically reflecting on the participatory approaches they have employed in attempts to shift power in policymaking – including the engagement with the post-2015 process. This blog introduces the ‘hydrology of policy’ to help illustrate the complex process of bringing research into policy influencing.

Knowledge generated by people living in poverty and marginalisation flows across different influencing levels, feeds into different spaces, leading to potential changes in discourse (and sometimes practice) and in policy that revert to affect the lived reality of people on the ground. But this is not a one way process: changing discourse can open new spaces, and changes in practice can influence discourse. Local level changes can proliferate ‘horizontally’ to other communities; and likewise ‘vertically’ these changes can influence what happens at the national or global level. This can be understood as the ‘hydrology of policy’ (see illustration below).

The ‘hydrology of policy’ shows how the ideas, needs, proposals for change and experiences from the poorest and most marginalised people can be represented as the water that starts from springs in the local isolated places where they live, flowing into little streams. These streams of ideas, needs, proposals and experiences join to create rivers that feed the big river that represents the global debate on the post-2015 themes. Most of the decisions are taken in places where marginalised voices are hardly heard, because the springs are far away from where the big river joins the sea. From the illustration it is clear that the rivers go through a winding route, with obstacles such as dams along the way that limit and control the flow of the water. This represents the challenges faced while trying to bring the voices of the poor and marginalised to the place where the decisions are taken. Often they only reach after an ‘evaporation’ in which their perspectives on the change they want has almost disappeared and are little considered by the decision-makers.

The results of the global debate are represented as clouds which depict the general discourse and practice of ‘development’ from the perspective of the decision-makers. The clouds move towards land and arrive back at the source of the spring as a ‘rain’ of projects, programmes or simple promises from government and social actors. As in the real world, rain can be light, causing drought, or can be heavy, like a storm, in both cases not responsive to the poorest and marginalised.

Bringing research into policy influencing at multiple levels is a complex process, and engaging across different levels to achieve changes in development that prioritise the poorest and most marginalised people is not without challenges. Demand for change needs to happen at every level of the system – from local to global and global back to local.

Perverse adj. deliberately deviating from what is regarded as normal, good, or proper (Collins English Dictionary)

The Department for International Development (DFID) claims to be a world leader in developing results-based aid, and now Payment by Results (PbR). PbR means that recipients will have to show results before they are paid. It will help to share risk, we are told, and radically re-balance accountability. It makes sense for DFID ‘to take a tougher, more business-like approach by requiring results up front before payment is made. Better sharing of risk in this way will drive value for money as partners become more incentivised to deliver’.

The drift of the past two decades away from participation and towards top-down controls and upwards accountability has been continuous and gradual, a heating of the water in the pot. The logframe, results-based management, upwards accountability, delivering value for money, business cases… these are motherhood and apple pie words with their mantras and procedures. They have to be good. More of them has to be better. But what has been happening to the frogs in the pot as these procedures intensify and heat it up?

Inside the DFID pot, am I right? More managers have been recruited who have no experience of development. Total staff numbers have been reduced while budgets have increased! (Before he became Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell said in public on two separate occasions at the University of Sussex that to do this would be ‘ridiculous’). But it is worse than this. The staff to funds ratio has declined while in the name of accountability and value for money internal procedures have become more and more laborious and staff intensive. Not least of these is making the business case for a project, which is much the same time-consuming effort for £500,000 as for £50 million, 100 times as much. So staff are more tied than ever to their headquarters and offices, have less and less time for ‘the field’ and actually grounding and learning the truth for themselves of what is going on, at a time when aid is going out in bigger dollops. Value for money? The DFID frogs in the heating pot have forgotten (or the recent tadpoles never knew) what it used to be like. The frogs already there socialise them into acceptance. And how can they jump out? They need the water – work, careers, and (unspoken) the power that comes with increasingly stringent upwards accountability.

Realities beyond the pot

And outside the DFID pot, the recipients or would-be recipients are facing obstacle courses of complexity, emergence and unpredictability. This applies markedly with NGOs and with research – NGOs work in highly risk-prone environments, research would not be needed if the results were known – but DFID funding has increasingly become a dysfunctional demoralising nightmare with escalating risks and transaction costs. Goals and targets have become more rigid, measurement has taken over from judgement, linear Newtonian thinking and action denies and obliterates non-linear realities, motivation has to be ‘incentivised’ by carrots and now with PbR the sticks have no carrots at all, relationships have become distant, trust, discretion and flexibility have gone out of the window and reporting becomes more of a misleading nightmare. And as aid monies go in larger lumps to consortia so transaction costs are transferred from inside to outside DFID, and unsuccessful bidders suffer disappointment, distress and costs… Am I wrong? I invite rebuttal. Let’s be evidence-based.

Take rural sanitation. We have learnt a lot in the last decade: the top-down building of toilets for people doesn’t work as CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) has shown – people have to want to end open defecation, have to want toilets, and have to use them, keep them clean, and maintain and improve them; the astonishing spread of CLTS in African countries and elsewhere and its adoption by over 20 governments is evidence enough – despite problems common to all programmes that go to scale it is dramatically more cost-effective than earlier approaches, and this is well known in DFID. But we all know that with good and enduring participation, you cannot predict speed. Perversely there are evidently now targets, paid by results, for toilets. Forced to achieve targets for payment after results, organisations may have to choose: abandon participation and do what they know won’t work, or go bankrupt, or lie (well, massage facts, gloss realities, mislead, report on what was planned not learn from what happened…). I know a participatory organisation with an excellent track record which is being bankrupted through one of these contracts: the senior management have had no remuneration for six months. If it goes under, this will be a result of PbR, evaluators please note, and please ensure, DFID, that negative externalities like this will be identified, costed and reported in all evaluations of PbR.

The rise of PbR – to what end and at whose cost?

Standing back, let’s ask: what is going on? How far will this go? At what gratuitous cost to people living in poverty, and diminished cost-effectiveness of our tax payers’ money? Is this what we had in mind when we campaigned for 0.7 per cent? For the obstacle course of development, are straitjackets now to be de rigueur? Brave new world. And who is accountable to whom? There isn’t the faintest whiff of accountability to poor people. Has that been utterly forgotten? And how many aid managers have development field experience (and by field I don’t mean in other capital cities)? Do they confuse accountability – the words are similar – with accountancy? DFID is proud of meeting its spending targets! Who in DFID recognises that not spending budgets can be an indicator of participation and empowerment? That it is good to save money? Who rewards those who save money or spend it slowly because they are empowering people through participation?

The perversities of PbR and related approaches are set to diminish value for money:

Misfit with complexity. PbR and fixed goals, targets, milestones misfit complexity, unpredictability, flexibility, adaptability. Strait jackets for obstacle courses? Less that is good will be achieved. The Secretary of State has claimed that ‘DFID is … becoming a world leader in pioneering innovative Payments by Results programmes for tackling complex development problems’ (my italics) It is precisely with complex development problems where PbR’s misfit is most stark and tragic, and worst value for taxpayer’s money.

Misleading reporting. Incentives can be perverse incentives to report results. Shoddy work: do what the numbers demand, never mind sustainability, ownership, empowerment – you can’t measure those so easily. Bias to the measurable. DFID ‘ …being paid by results… (drives up) performance standards, management and measurement {sic]’. Yet Andrew Naitsios, former head of USAID said ‘ …those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable’ (No surprise that infrastructure is so much the rage – it can be measured)

View of human nature. ‘Incentives’, ‘incentivise’ – in PbR there is an unspoken implication that people working in ‘aid’ are doing it for the money (an insulting view of what drives people in development NGOs and research). That is not what motivates the vast majority of the people I know. They work in development because they actually care and want to make a difference

Disbursement targets. It is a matter of pride that DFID is ‘meeting its spending targets’. Spend the budget by the end of the financial year. Get the money out of the door in time. Tick. But too much aid too fast is a widespread complaint from recipients.

I could go on. In the world of NGOs and research at least, and probably much more widely, the effects of PbR seem set to be cruelly perverse.

In any case, where is the evidence that PbR is better than alternatives? Until PbR is soundly evidence-based, while DFID may be a world leader in payment by results, for aid to be cost-effective, and for the sake of people living in poverty, let there be no followers. If DFID want to be a world leader, perhaps this could be in honest, insightful evaluation of PbR which goes deep into its externalities and the realities of all who are affected.

Alternative paths to the PbR highway

And let us note that outside the DFID pot, there is another, thrilling, world evolving. Last month I was at the biennial Development Cooperation Forum in New York, convened by the Economic and Social Council of the UN. There was talk there of ‘trust-based inclusive partnerships’ ‘horizontal relationships’, ‘South-South collaboration’ and the sense of a new dawn, a re-recognition of the vital significance of relationships which are not distorted by power.

So in PbR, where is the understanding of people, of communities, of participation, of complexity, where is the listening, where are the relationships in this world sanitised of humanity, and of people, of the personal? Read the wonderful book Time to Listen: hearing people on the receiving end of international aid (Anderson et al 2012) whose researchers listened to almost 6,000 recipients of aid. And what did they say? They said they appreciated aid but would prefer not to need it. They said it comes too much and too fast. They said they want and need relationships with donors, face-to-face, but contact is rare, if ever, and then rushed. They said they had to divert time and energy from action to demoralising and misleading reporting and upward accountability. Again and again, they point to hidden transaction costs…. And the Time to Listenresearchers found that wherever there was a good initiative or project there was always a person.

To conclude: To give better value for money, please DFID

radically simplify and streamline your internal procedures and free up staff time,

recruit many more staff with grassroots field experience and who understand development realities, and free them to be in touch with the rapidly changing realities outside their pot, and

put PbR on hold until a few examples can be evaluated in depth over time.

If you did these three things, you would indeed, truly, be leading the world. And there is one more thing. To deliver astronomical value for money (and without a business case) the Secretary of State could authorise the purchase of 2000 copies of Time to Listen and send them to all DFID staff. As a starter, I am mailing her a copy.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations was expected to publish his report to the General Assembly on the MDGs and the post-2015 development agenda on 12 August. How much of his insight will have been informed by listening to the voices of the poorest and most marginalised? Participate partners have been critically reflecting on the participatory methods they have employed in attempts to shift power in policy making. One such approach, the Participate Ground Level Panels (GLPs) created a participative space for people living in poverty and marginalisation to deliberate what is needed from the post-2015 global policy process.

In 2013, Participate partners hosted three deliberative meetings between those living poverty and those with political authority through Ground Level Panels (GLPs). The idea for a GLP aimed to provide a mirror to the deliberations of the United Nations (UN) High Level Panel (HLP) but from people who lived in extreme poverty or marginalisation.

The Ground Level Panels took place in Egypt, Brazil, Uganda and India. Each panel comprised a group of 10-14 people with diverse and intersecting identities including urban slum dwellers; disabled people; sexual minorities; people living in conflict and natural disaster-affected areas; people living in geographically isolated communities; nomadic and indigenous people; older people; internally displaced people; and young people. Each panel created relationships, shared experiences, connected the local level to the national and international development contexts and provided a critical review and reality check on the five transformative shifts as outlined by the UN High Level Panel.

The GLPs saw the world through a different lens to the HLP. The people in the Panels understood the dynamics of change facing people living in poverty and this gave them the ability to say if these policies were meaningful. While economic growth is an unchallenged assumption in the HLP for the Brazilian GLP it was seen as part of the ‘death plan’. For the Brazilians the critical issue is not ‘poverty’ per se, but ‘misery’ and ‘dignity’. While the HLP focused on service provision, the Indian Panel’s desired goals largely focus on social norms, behaviour and discrimination.

There were some common themes which emerged in all of the Panels. People want to feel that they have meaningful control over the influences that impact their lives. In all cases structures for equal participation were highlighted as foundational. In almost all of the Panels there was a recurring theme of ‘self management’. People don’t want aid. They want the means to generate and sustain their own livelihoods. So if we are serious about moving ‘beyond aid’ in the new development agenda then empowerment must become the priority.

One thing that struck me was the difference in composition of the HLP and the GLPs. The HLP was made up of people largely from an elite political class. There was the odd member of royalty and a few interesting academics thrown in, but by and large they were high ranking politicians. There was very little diversity in the group, and the interests were narrow. The GLPs on the other hand were highly diverse. Slum dwellers sitting side by side with pastoralists, transgender people, and people living in refugee camps … It is easy to stereotype people as ‘poor’and see them as a huge sprawling undifferentiated ‘category’, but they bring far more diversity than people who hold power.

What defines the success of a Ground Level Panel? Is it the response of the national government or within the UN process, or is it also influence on policy at the local levels? For Natalie Newell who led the GLP in Uganda on behalf of Restless Development, the experience demonstrated the importance of the local level. ”It is important to be clear with all involved about what can realistically be achieved from the GLP process. This includes considering the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and what it can add to the policy debate. From the perspectives of those that participated in the Uganda process, the changes at the community level and for them as people were an important success.”

Listen to Nava and Richard’s reflections on the Uganda Ground Level Panel.

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About this blog

The Participation, Power and Social Change (PPSC) blog is written by researchers from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK. It also includes contributions from other experts.
The PPSC Team at IDS works in partnership with diverse collaborators from around the world to generate ideas and action for social change.
The posts on this blog reflect the opinions of each individual, and not necessarily those of IDS.

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